God in the 'Devil’s Territories:' Mather's Use of Rhetoric in Wonders of the Invisible World

Mather, a preacher, theologian, and historian, exercised great authority in early New England, and still retains some of that authority today, for his clear depiction of the area’s history. Authority is a large part of Mather’s argument in Wonders of the Invisible World, used in his logos, his logical arguments, and his extrinsic ethos and intrinsic ethos, and he often uses religion as proof of his authority, with references to America as the ‘Devil’s territories’ and the Puritans as God’s chosen, and all three rhetoric principles are used and interconnected.

Cotton Mather uses both extrinsic (his expertise, education, and authority in the subject) and intrinsic (how he writes) ethos to reinforce his authority on the subject on which he is speaking, combining these expressions of authority and power with logos and pathos that we as future readers may not find persuasive but would have been to people in his time. His overall use of ethos, pathos, and logos is more focused on ethos and logos, with bits of pathos in forms that correspond to the religious approach taken by the majority of people in the colonies. He makes his point often with logos, using mostly the forms of ‘claim or consequence’ and ‘Testimony and authority.’. He also uses religion as proof of his authority, and the authority of the Puritans in New England in general, as seen in the first part of Wonders of the Invisible World, “A People of God in the Devil’s Territories.” He says “the New Englanders are a people of God settled in those, which were once the devil’s territories…the devil was exceedingly disturbed, when he perceived such a people here accomplishing the promise of old.”. He proceeds to speak of the methods used, he says, by the devil to d...

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...s religion. In ethos, Mather uses God to give him and the other Puritans authority. In pathos, religion is used to incite reactions from the audience, with such examples as Phebe Chandler used to install these ideas and feelings in the form of victim’s testimonies. And in logos, religion is used in ‘Testimony and authority’, one of the main devices he uses, by citing God and Jesus as ‘good’ religious figures against the devil, the ‘bad’ religious figure. Mather also uses these devices separately, using intrinsic and extrinsic ethos to give himself authority and make his authority more prominent, using claim of consequence logos to give a clear backbone to his argument and analogy logos to give good, convincing comparisons, and using the witnesses’ testimonies and the outrages committed against them as levers and tools to chisel the audiences emotions in his pathos.